Meet artist Sarah Sze, and learn more about the ways her work intersects with the museum’s architecture in this exhibition.

Transcript
Sarah Sze: My name is Sarah Sze. I’m an artist.

So time is interesting in this show in that you have the very early piece of mine, a very late piece of mine, and then all new work in between. And it shows this thread in my own work but also shows this thread, I think, over the time of my work—where the digital and the analog and the object and the image in my mind get more and more melded, confused.

Sometimes you can’t remember if you met someone online or in person. You can’t remember if you saw that show in real life or not. And then the question is, like, what does that do for us? Like, is that good? Is it bad? How do we experience things differently?

I was trained in painting and architecture, and then I came to sculptures. But the sculpture was heavily informed by the spontaneity of painting and the kind of concerns of making an environment and the experience that architecture brings with it.

I’m interested in what each medium does better than something else. Like, what can a painting do that a sculpture can’t do? What can a video do that a photograph can’t do? So it’s another reason why I use found objects, because this glass is scaled to me, this ceiling is scaled to me, this pen is scaled to me. I know how it feels in my hand. And so in the work, placing something that becomes like a compass for your own body to relate to the work is actually something you can do with a found object.

One of the things that’s really different about the show is we wanted to try and make a show that kind of spilled over the whole museum. That’s more like a dotted line that you connect through space. And in this show, something that’s super site specific that you’ll never have again.

I’ve always done public work. So, in New York, there’s LaGuardia. Ninety-Sixth Street subway is close by. I did a piece on the High Line. I did one at Doris Freedman Plaza. That was important to bring to the Guggenheim show, so we really committed to doing something on the outside of the building to both draw people in. But even if you don’t come inside, you have an experience in public space of an artwork, rather than this idea of walking to a museum, having something on a pedestal, being told that it’s important. It’s more about taking work off the pedestal and creating an experience where you find, you discover, you question.

Coming in and being radical in a space can be very subtle and very powerful. What matters is you remember it, and what matters is it affects your thinking and you make things yourself, or you make decisions in the world, you perceive the world different. It’s this spill of that experience into the world that matters, right? But it has to actually touch you in some way and affect you in some way to change the way you see the world.

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